|
About 1021 Park Avenue
One of the most distinctive and elegant buildings on the avenue, this very attractive apartment building was erected in 1929 as a cooperative.
The 14-story building has only 27 apartments and was designed by Rosario Candela and Kenneth M. Murchison and erected by John and Joseph Campagna, the son of Anthony Campagna, one of the city’s most important developers of luxury residential buildings. Candela was the leading architect of luxury apartment buildings of his era.
The red-brick building with a three-story limestone base, gargoyles and a handsome enclosed rooftop watertank enclosure, is notable because its asymmetrical design makes it appear to be more than one building and because it is also very compatible with the very handsome former townhouse of Reginald de Koven, a composer of light opera, that was designed in Jacobean Renaissance style by John Russell Pope, immediately to the north and is also directly across the sidestreet from another very interesting mansion.
This apartment building has considerable "light-and-air" because of both the mansions and the Park Avenue Christian Church diagonally across the avenue.
In his excellent book, "Park Avenue, Street of Dreams," (Atheneum, 1990), James Trager provides the following account of the site’s history:
"Quite a few Park Avenue houses went up in the years before World War I. A private residence designed by Hunt & Hunt for Amos R. E. Pinchot was finished in 1910 at the northeast corner of 85th Street. Pinchot, a lawyer, was the brother of Gifford, the conservationist who superintended the 119,000 acres of forest that surrounded Biltmore House, designed by Richard Morris Hunt for William Henry Vanderbilt’s youngest son, George Washington, and completed in 1896. Gifford headed the U.S. Forest Service but was fired by President Taft after joining others in charging the Secretary of the Interior, Richard A. Ballinger, with conflict of interest - a cause celebre in 1910. The Pinchot house was later occupied under lease by Mrs. Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, Vincent Astor, and Joseph C. Baldwin before being purchased by Edward R. Stettinus, a J. P. Morgan partner, who occupied it until his death in the late 1920’s."
Trager also noted that Amos Pinchot had sold Lewis Gouverneur Morris the lot on the southeast corner at this intersection, directly across from the sidestreet entrance of 1021 Park Avenue. Morris had the building on it razed and replaced with a building designed by Ernest Flagg that he moved into from his former residence at 77 Madison Avenue. The new, gable, dark red-brick house had hip-roofed dormer windows, a cupola over its elevator tower, and a garage in its east wing. Trager wrote that the daughters of Morris sold the townhouse in 1967 to the New World Foundation, "established in 1954 to carry out the testamentary wishes of the reaper heiress, Anita McCormick Blaine."
This building adjoined the garden of Mrs. Reginald de Koven, widow of the composer, and also backed up on the garden of the Park Avenue Methodist Church on 86th Street.
The building is not far from to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue and there are numerous schools and religious institutions nearby. Cross-town buses run on 86th Street and an express subway station is at Lexington Avenue and 86th Street as well as major stores such as Barnes & Noble and HMV. The area also has several movie theaters.
|
